Imagine. You’ve been captured by a plunder of punctuation-hating pirates and forced to walk the plank. As you teeter, The Oxford Guide to Writing and The Chicago Manual of Style clutched to your breast, the pirate king speaks. “The semicolon has no place in online writing!” he says. “Renounce your admiration for it and live!”

What do you do?

Take the West Coast Editor poll and tell us. Are semicolons essential aids to understanding—even in online writing—fulfilling a role distinct from that of the full stop? Or are they mere affectations, relics from our print-bound past?

Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts about semicolons, Laura. We appreciate it. Just one request: would you mind registering your vote with Polldaddy? Polldaddy won’t allow us to vote on your behalf, which is, when we stop to think about it, a good thing!